Alfred Starr Hamilton
1914-2005
liquid'll what?  

what's new as of 10 Dec 2006

    
 

Selected Bibliography

Books

Sphinx. Kumquat Press, Montclair, NJ 1968

Published by Geof Hewitt. Kumquat Press apparently still exists and you can reach them at: Kumquat Press, P.O. Box 51, Calais, VT 05648. Hewitt is himself a poet who leads workshops across the state of Vermont. He's been a juried member of the Vermont Arts Council since 1971.

The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton.  Introduction by Geof Hewitt. Drawings by Philip Van Aver. The Jargon Society, Penland, NC 1970

"Al Hamilton is the kind of poet everybody says they'd like to be.  He doesn't apply for grants and has probably never heard of the national Council on the Arts.  He doesn't teach in a college or write reviews or wash dishes in a diner and other odd jobs.  He writes poetry.  All he does is write poetry."

The Jargon Society
PO Box 15458
Winston-Salem, NC 27113

The Big Parade. The Best Cellar Press, 1982

"This book is published as a special issue of the poetry magazine PEBBLE. This is issue number 22."

Best Cellar Press
Greg Kuzma, Editor
Department of English
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Lincoln, NE 68588

Magazines

Workshop 25. Fall, 1975. Bob Arnold, Ed.

I don't know what poems are included.

American Poetry Review. March/April, 1976:  "Color Lines," "Moon," "To Father Coughlin," "Pink Ponds;" p.13

"I am immune."

Poetry Now. Volume III. Numbers 3-6 (Issues 15-18), 1976:  "Our Flag," "The Pool," "Wilkes Barre, Pa.," "Broom Factory," "Visitations," "War;" p. 60-61

Journal of New Jersey Poets. Volume XVII. Number 2, 1995:  "Mirrorland," "Beautiful," "A Town without a Soul;" p. 1-3

[Follow the links to read the poems]

Anthologies

Quickly Aging Here: Some of the Poets of the 1970's. Geof Hewitt, Ed. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1969.

Bleb Twelve. Gardner, Geoffrey, Ed. New York, NY: Bleb, 1977.

Thus Spake the Corpse : An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998 : Volume 2. Andrei Codrescu & Laura Rosenthals, Eds: "God," "February," & "New York City Public Library Lions."

Bluestones and Salt Hay. An Anthology of Contemporary New Jersey Poets. Joel Lewis, ed. Rutgers University Press, 1990. Foreword by Anne Waldman.

 

Alfred Starr Hamilton ca.1970
photo by Simpson Kalisher
from the back cover of
The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton

HAMILTON, Alfred Starr  1914-

PERSONAL:  Borne June 14, 1914, in Montclair, N.J.; son of Alfred Starr and Virginia (Gildersleeve) Hamilton. Education:  Attended high school in Montclair, N.J. Politics:  Socialist.  Religion:  "Immune."  Home and office:   41 South Willow St., Montclair, N.J. 07042.

CAREER:  Poet.  Military service:  U.S. Army, 1942-43.

WRITINGS:  Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton, Jargon Press, 1970.  Contributor to Epoch, New Directions, Foxfire, New Letters, Archive, and Greenfield Review.

SIDELIGHTS:  Hamilton has hitchhiked through forty-three states.

source:  Contemporary Authors:  A bio-bibliographical guide to current writers in fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, journalism, drama, motion pictures, television, and other fields. Volumes 53-56. 1975: p.264

    

About Alfred Starr Hamilton

The New York Times.  April 13 and May 25, 1975

On April 13 Jonathan Williams has "The Guest Word" in the New York Times Book Review.  He berates James Dickey for high reading fees and praises Hamilton.  The article repeats the Hamilton story told by Hewitt and makes a plea on his behalf for money, adding that for 1975 he only needs about $2,000.  A Spartan existence is outlined.  The details differ, but it is essentially the same story given by Geof Hewitt in his intro to The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton.

"I'm not immune.  I'm just out in the open.  There aren't as many bees as there used to be."

On May 25 Williams writes in to report that Hamilton donations have come to the tune of $5,600 dollars.

New: American and Canadian Poetry. Number 9, 1969; p. 40-41

Review of Sphinx by Eric Torgersen

"Notes towards extinction: American poetry wipe-out." New: American and Canadian Poetry. Number 15, 1970; p. 39-44

This essay is a "state of poetry today" kind of thing.  Hewitt doesn't say anything about Hamilton that couldn't be applied to any number of other poets, but he does praise his unique voice, apparent lack of concern for literary "fashion" and ability to maintain a strong "presence" in the poetry without being its sole object. 

Three poems are given in full:  "Liquid'll," "April Lights," and "Hark"

Blackbird Dust. Jonathan Williams. Turtle Point Press, 2000.

Includes his NYT article from May 25, 1975.

    Alfred Starr Hamilton is an enigma.  His name is dropped at Exquisite Corpse a few times; the front page as of 11/22/01 accuses house poet Mike Topp of ripping Hamilton off.  Somewhere else he is referred to as a "folk treasure."  That seems a bit condescending but Hewitt substantiates.  He seems uncomfortable but says Hamilton is "eccentric."  Hamilton lived with his mother until she died in 1964 and left him seven grand.  He then moved into a linoleum-floored room in a boarding house at 41 S. Willow St. NJ.  As of 1970 he'd been living on 1000 dollars a year (much is made of his penury), visiting the local library and Salvation Army, copping butts.  His photograph shows a well-dressed and sane-looking older gentleman.  But those could be Army clothes and his nails are peculiarly long.
    Speaking of the Army, the US Army, Hamilton was drafted and went AWOL after less than a year.  "I got a discharge somehow," he writes in the blurb for his poems appearing in the APR in 1976.  This was during the War.  Something of this cantankerous spirit survived until 1961.  He refused to participate in a civil air raid drill and was fined and briefly jailed.  Other than that he can drive, has a sister, drinks Four Roses and once serviced candy machines (after the war; it disgusted him).  Biographical information is scant, but he claims to have hitchhiked through forty-three states.  If so, Montclair has always always remained his home port: The 2000 Directory of America Poets and Fiction Writers says he's still at 41 S. Willow.  That would make him 87.
    His first appearance in print, Sphinx (1969), was published out of Montclair by Geof Hewitt aka Kumquat Press.  In his review of Sphinx (New, No. 9), Eric Torgersen mentions that these pamphlets were free for the asking.  (Online it currently lists for 25 dollars).  Torgersen praises Hamilton; he says he's often inaccessible, but when he isn't, he's dead-on.  Torgersen also says there are longer poems in Sphinx, which is not the case for what I've seen in print.  The poems in APR and Poetry Now are short.  These poems published in the mid-seventies have a tendency to catalogue, taking a phrase and repeating it, often asking a question.  The tone is bemused and iconoclastic but never mean-spirited.  The meanings are enigmatic.  It's as if there is a code to be broken.  The object of the poems is often the natural world, but rarely the world of man-made things.  In the world but not of it, so to speak.  Break the code and enter the Hamilton cosmos.  One slightly demonic-looking man secretly manipulating the world from the center of the universe.
    Needless to say, I like Hamilton.  I stumbled across the Jargon book by accident at Cornell's Olin library and was immediately struck by the simplicity and strangeness of the poems.  The book itself is a handsome volume and the introductory remarks by Hewitt interesting.  Wanting to learn more about this character, I turned to the internet, came up with a few references.  It didn't occur to me until some time later to get the articles and poems themselves.  I am still waiting for a few things, which I will review here.  I'm hoping to reproduce the articles online, but an annotated bibliography will do just as well, for now.

--S. Adkins November 23, 2001

Ho ho! Seems in this lil' squib I am mistaken in some of my facts. John Latta's blog, Hotel Point, has a good summary (dated Jan 2, 2004) of Hamilton's pulished work and includes the text of a few poems, including "Crabapples," which appears to be his first poem in print, in Cornell University's Epoch (Fall 1962 issue aka Vol. XII, No. 3) and not in Sphinx as I wrote above. For more details I suggest reading the blog iself, which though brief, includes some interesting context and observations. Seems this extended entry refers back to his note on Dec 12, 2003: "Poking around in old bound volumes of Epoch yesterday after Ron Silliman’s mention of Alfred Starr Hamilton, a name, unforgettable enough, that’d got bruit’d around Cornell in the early ’seventies..."

--S. Adkins November 11, 2004

Have you any information on this enigmatic poet?